Aging and living in urban US

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Once Upon a Time Near the Beach

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, in a snuggly hamlet close to the beach lived — for many summers — about 100 girls, at any one time. And they would grow up and know each other for decades and decades. But not yet.

And some years spun by and the little girls became hormonal teenagers. And, as hormonal teenagers, the subjects of sex, drugs and — alas, not rock ‘n roll, but — punk captivated each and every brain cell in their still-formative minds.

There was one such girl, shy in her youth and averse to tongue kissing (let’s not discuss Greg Pogarsky), whose hormones would transform her, in her teenage years, into, well, let’s think of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly.

And more years spun by and now the girl is 50. And Septembers bring her back to that snuggly little hamlet filled with love and friends, like a genetic homing instinct.

The smell of the air is the same as it was in our youth. We all breathe in so deeply as if to capture the memories in our bodies’ organs.

And karma is a boomerang. And it plays out like a maestro hitting our emotional buttons.

[play music to suggest that the idyllic story takes a turn for the humorous and slightly ooky]

And now she is a mom of a college freshman son.

And in the serene place where we can be as carefree as we were decades ago, technology and too much information intrude. And in the same place (Google doesn’t discern between the steps of Lodge 1 or Lodge 2) as she pined for a young man named Will, came . . . .

“OMG, my son just got to college and he slept with a girl!!!”

“He texted you that?” All of us were thinking, but one person said.

“They spent the night together but I don’t know what happened, HAPPENED! I am trying to find out by asking if he put his sheets in the laundry.”

GREEK CHORUS: “Understated, yet smart.”

“Wrong question. He is a BOY. No matter what happened, he is not changing his sheets.“

GREEK CHORUS: sigh, “Truth”.

“Do you really need this information?” asked a sage one.

GREEK CHORUS: “NO one needs this knowledge.”

“DOES HE HAVE CONDOMS?” asked ALL of us.

GREEK CHORUS: “Is this ready for prime time?”

“I don’t know!! Ok. This is a first!!” [“Ok, HOW do you know that?” thought all of us.]

GREEK CHORUS: “We are closing our ears. We can’t HEAR you!!”

“Ok, congratulate him for ALL of us. Now, make sure that he has condoms,” said another sage one.

GREEK CHORUS: “Wait, this isn’t Braxton Family Values or Crazy Wives of [pick a City]. Let’s play on.”

Coincidentally, one among us is not only a professor at the young man’s college, but a professor of human sexuality.

“I would be happy to deliver the condoms in a see-through bag while I am on the campus. Is it ok if I say, ‘a group of your mother’s middle-age friends are very happy for you, but use these, please?‘“

GREEK CHORUS: “This is a whole new reality genre, like Naked Dating. Let’s hang out; we may be revived by something other than a Shakespeare festival!”

[Revert to the fairy tale music]

The morals of the story, as you can plainly see:

You do it, you live with it (you along with a posse of older women).

Stop texting your mother about these things.

Things are only sacred if they aren’t bloggable.

And we all lived happily ever after, looking forward to the next visit to Camp Wingate.